Sunday, March 16, 2014

Individual
understanding is…the primary aim of the activity thinking
about life. Though you can indeed learn
from those more experienced and wiser than yourself, you won’t count as learning
at all if you can’t take on board what you hear from them. Understanding here is…manifest in what you can say only in the sense that your words are among
your deeds. There must be some
relationship between thinking well about life and living well, and the goal of
the first is typically the second.

Here, then, is a
parallel between thinking about life and thinking
philosophically: the primary aim of each activity is
individual understanding. [….] There
is a sense in which a contemplative attitude is to be aimed at both in thinking
about life and thinking philosophically, and a guiding principle of both
activities is, or ought to be, to look to the bigger picture.
[….]

The relevance of
philosophy to real life, and to the ancient philosophical
question ‘How should I live?’, has more than one aspect; but…one way in which philosophy is relevant to
life would seem to be that thinking well about life and thinking well
philosophically require similar traits of mind and character. Philosophy is not just something done by
professional philosophers: any
remotely reflective person philosophizes from time to time. And it is good for a society or a culture if
the habit of philosophizing is generally valued.—Roger Teichmann in Nature, Reason, and the Good Life: Ethics for Human Beings
(2011)

***

“’There is no time for playing around,’ says Seneca,
attacking philosophers who devote their careers to logical puzzles. ‘…You have
promised to bring help to the shipwrecked, the imprisoned, the sick, the needy,
to those whose heads are under the poised axe. Where are you deflecting your
attention? What are you doing?”—Seneca (Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, 48.8)
quoted in Martha Nussbaum’s Therapy of
Desire: Theory and Practice in
Hellenistic Ethics (1994)

“Philosophy recovers itself when it ceases to be a device
for dealing with the problems of philosophers and becomes a method, cultivated
by philosophers, for dealing with the problems of men.”—John Dewey (1917)

“… [Plato] speaks of a descending as well as an ascending
dialectic and he speaks of a return to the cave.”—Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty
of Good Over Other Concepts” (1967)

“Philosophy involves us in the critical analysis of our
beliefs, and of the presuppositions of our beliefs, and it’s a very striking
fact that most people neither like doing this nor like having it done to them.
If the assumptions on which their beliefs rest are questioned it makes them feel
insecure, and they put up a strong resistance to it.”—Iris Murdoch in
conversation with Bryan Magee (1978)

“… [It is no accident] that more and more philosophers are
now being drawn into debates about environmental policy or medical ethics,
judicial practice or nuclear politics. Some of them contribute to those debates
happily: others look back at 300 years of professional tradition, and ask
whether oral, particular, local, and timely issues are really their concern.
They fear that engaging in ‘applied’ philosophy may prostitute their talents,
and distract them from the technical questions of academic philosophy proper.
Yet, one might argue, these practical debates are, by now, not ‘applied’
philosophy but philosophy itself.
More precisely they are now (as Wittgenstein put it) the ‘legitimate heirs’ of
the purely theoretical enterprise that used to be called philosophy; and, by
pursuing them, we break down the 300-year old barriers between ‘practice’ and
‘theory’ and reenter the technical core of philosophy from a fresh and more
productive direction.”—Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
(1990)

“What, however, about philosophy? Here the subject-matter
is the maps or structures by which thought works, and—as would probably be
agreed today—thought is not something separate from life. Yet, from the first
beginnings among the Greeks, there have always been some parts of philosophy
which were fiercely technical. Is it possible both to handle these properly and
do justice to the full richness of the questions as they arise in the life
around us? Can anyone speak both as a fully instructed professional and as a
whole human being? [….] For a long time, the English-speaking philosophical
tradition mostly nailed its colours defiantly to the post of wholeness and life.
Bacon, Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume and Mill all emphatically meant their
writings to be widely read and to affect people’s lives. Even Bertrand Russell
still often did so. But William James and John Dewey were among the last
influential figures to follow this track whole-heartedly. In the
twentieth-century, philosophy has largely gone with the rest of the academic
world in accepting thorough specialization.”—Mary Midgley, Utopias, Dolphins and Computers
(1996)

“A good many academic philosophers, for much of our own
century, have strenuously resisted the idea that philosophy can help us with how
to live. And while others, particularly in more recent times, have addressed
questions about happiness and well-being, for the most part they have shrunk
from offering more direct guidance on these matters to their fellow citizens.
This generalization, like most, is subject to notable exceptions, but it remains
true that the bulk of work on philosophical ethics is now addressed to those
within the specialist confines of the academy. As far as the educated public is
concerned, philosophy may, in the growing field of applied ethics, be perceived
as making an increasingly important contribution on matters of public policy
(problems concerned with such issues as the distribution of resources, the
justification of punishment, the morality of abortion, and so forth); but few
probably now expect much help from philosophers in the task of trying to live
fulfilled lives. If they are miserable, or find their lives in a mess, they much
more likely to turn to psychotherapy than to philosophy for guidance. [….] The
aspiration of philosophical reason to lay down a blueprint for how we should
live tends to run aground when trying to deal with that side of our human nature
which is largely opaque to the deliverances of reason—that affective side which
has to do with the origins and operation of the emotions or passions. It is here
that the contributions of psychoanalytic theory play a vital role. Though
largely ignored by most specialists in moral philosophy, the concept of the
unconscious turns out to have profound implications for the traditional task of
ethics to seek out the conditions for human fulfillment.—John Cottingham, Philosophy and the Good Life
(1998)

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